Working With Smart People

Today I had a great discussion with a businessman from my town. He pays attention to the claims people make and understands how to decipher fraudulent claims. In addition he knows where to look for the best and most accurate information, which leads to great conversations if you can engage him on that level. Today he mused at how wrong Republicans have gotten things. He started out by repeating back some very interesting details about our unemployment numbers. There are just under six million people in Wisconsin. There are just under four million that are working age, 15-65. Just 130,000 are unemployed. Businesses claim they have 150,000 jobs to fill, so that sounds like we need at least 20,000 more people after we get everyone unemployed to work. Expecting further reductions in unemployment without making significant changes to the availability and affordability of childcare, healthcare and education, getting to complete employment is utter fantasy. I worked for just one week with a whole crew of people who make up that last few percent, those chronically unemployed, and they have good reason for not having found a place to fit in. A short list of issues tha tthey bring are racist, sexist, jokes, comments and attitudes, professing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, neglecting safety protocols, claiming either ignorantly or deceitfully false information is true and outright dangerous behavior. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that most people probably don't want full employment as they have not been trained to deal effectively with sociopaths and psychopaths. Just excluding those two personality types from employment would keep unemployment at five percent! We can't just will something to happen and as much as Republicans like to claim that their policies will help create the most jobs, we have often seen the opposite to be true. Obama for instance, took office with the economy in shambles with over 10% unemployment and during his two terms cut unemployment by more than half! Clinton too, inherited an economy with near seven percent unemployment and during his time in office brought it down to just four percent. Similarly, President Carter received the economy in the worst ever postwar unemployment at 9% and reduced it slowly and steadily to under six percent, until the very end of his term when it rose to slightly above six percent. Kennedy and Johnson both had Adminstrations that presided over lowering of unemployment, Kennedy hammered it down fron over 7%, down to fiv and Johnson continued, first pretty stteply, but the trend continued until unemployment was about two points lower than he had inherited it. Even Truman had averaged under four percent unemployment through his term, although in 1949, there was a spike to nearly double that. His average unemployment rate was the lowest of all Post War Administrations. I am always honored when people that have been paying attention share with me the things they are most concerned about. I hope they feel the same way when I speak from my heart about matters that concern me. I hope that everyone develops working relationships with those who pay attention, those who can sift and winnow facts from fiction. Especially in an age of digital communication and the power of the internet, there is no excuse for not learning how to determine fact from fiction, yet millions seem to be comfortable with perpetrating delusions and flights of fancy on the public at large. Whether we care to hear them or not, they seem bent on screaming about how they have the right to their alternative facts or thinly veiled opinions baqsed on hate. When we were taught about what democracy means, they forgot to tell us that in the Revolutionary War, the majority wanted to stay with Britain. The loud-mouthed bullies have been getting their way ever since. My theory is that we no longer have a world in which we can tell people, "Leave the tribe", because wherever they go pretty much across the whole face of the earth, they will then be perpetrated upon another tribe. We have run out of islands that can be turned into penal colonies. There are too few waste lands to send these people to. I recently had to leave an employer because of dumb. All of the claims they made of professionalism were dwarfed by their real world actions, those of amateurs. Sadly, they were even amateur thinkers. I will gladly return to work with the thoughtful boss, he honors me with honestly derived information, the dolts want me to believe their delusions or at least not expose their logical fallacies. Life is too short and I have too much at risk to let that slide. Seek and don't settle for less than we all deserve! Just imagine, how well things might go if we could all agree that business thinking they can fill twenty thousand more jobs than if every single unemployed person showed up ready to work for them is simply goofy! The imaginary twenty-thousand are hard to square. If a human being was claiming to envision a cadre of twenty-thousand, where they did not exist, there would be good reason to get their mental health checked. In Wisconsin, extrapolating last month's lost jobs, we are losing about 150,000 jobs per year. It takes us more than two years to graduate that many new young people through High School into the job market. The sooner we admit that the only Post War Republican President to reduce unemployment during their term was Reagan, the sooner we can forget all the other economic gimmics they profess. The greatest irony is that before Reagan go tthe unemployment rate down, it first had to spike to a Post War high of over 10.8% he then slowly brought it down to just below six percent by the time he left office. The right wing has never been against spending, as long as it benefits the ultrawealthy, or extracts more money from the rest of us that goes right into corporate profits, not laborers pockets, not into the hands of those who need it most, never to those who have been disenfranchised or marginalized, but those who pay for campaigns. The donor class. We all see it, we are all tired of it, we must cultivate realtionships with others who see what has been done and vote to fix it! KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!